Broadening minds on cycling from a narrowboat

Birmingham initiative creating city centre cycling hub - and education for students with lerarning disabilities

Mark Duce shows Trinity Specialist College student Jonathan Newman how to service a bike

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A NEW cycle hub is emerging beside the Gas Street Basin. MARY GRIFFIN visited Cambrian Wharf where a floating workshop is using bicycles as a tool for training and gaining employment.

The sun beats down on a city centre canal where the long Carina narrowboat is a hive of industry.

On the towpath two men are working on a mountain bike, while aboard the boat two more are busy tinkering in the galley workshops.

Around the helm a group of students and teachers are taking a well-earned tea break. This is Cycle Chain, Birmingham’s floating bike workshop, where mechanics teach students with learning disabilities how to make old bikes as good as new.

As well as teaching students from Trinity Specialist College, in Sutton Coldfield, the workshop helps to ‘upskill’ unemployed people and also supplies bikes to the Youth Offending Team for people who’ve found work but have no means of getting there.

Just a stone’s throw from the NIA, the Sealife Centre and Brindleyplace, the boat is tucked away on Cambrian Wharf.

And the idea is to turn this hidden gem into a cycle hub for the city centre.

After surveying 300 cyclists along Birmingham’s towpaths, Cycle Chain found there was a strong demand for secure cycle parking in the city centre as well as shower facilities for workers biking into town. They gained planning permission and installed a series of cycle stands next to their workshop at the wharf.

And now they’re in the process of securing access to a neighbouring building owned by the Canal and River Trust, where cyclists will be able to use the shower and toilet facilities.

“We want to create a cycle hub”, says Mark Duce, Cycle Chain’s finance director, “somewhere where cyclists can use facilities and non-cyclists can hire a bike.”

The enterprise takes charge of 700 bikes from West Midlands Police each year – that’s more than a dozen coming through the workshop every week.

The bicycles have been recovered after being stolen, lost or dumped and their owners can’t be traced so they go to Cycle Chain to be recycled.

“The time we spend on each one varies from a couple of hours tarting-up a bike to a couple of days really mucking in and getting the rust off,” says Cycle Chain founder John Shaw.

The project was first launched in 2002 when John, a bike technician, was asked to teach cycle maintenance to visually impaired students at Queen Alexandra College in Harborne.

At the time, John – a former racing cyclist who had spent seven years in the Netherlands racing as a sponsored amateur – was running two shops, one in Erdington and one in Northfield.

And after teaching at Queen Alexandra, he went on to work with people with mental health difficulties at Bierton Road School in Yardley.

“The bicycle is a brilliant device for us,” he says. “We are using it as a tool for learning and as a way to create employment.”

Frustratingly, John was seeing disabled students coming back to his courses year-after-year because they were struggling to find work.

“There are very different levels of learning difficulty and these were really nice people and very bright. And that’s the reason we set up Cycle Chain.”

Cycle Chain became a floating venture last year, hopping aboard the Carina in September after buying it from British Waterways for a grand total of £1.

Mark and John are passionate advocates for encouraging newcomers on to bikes and want to push family-friendly cycling in Birmingham by promoting the city’s leisure routes and designing a series of heritage tours and trails by bike.

Their aim now is to secure funding so they can employ students to run Cycle Chain’s new bike hire scheme – launched this week – sending cyclists of all ages off from Cambrian Wharf along Birmingham’s towpaths for £12 a day.